Secret Keeper
by karebear
Summary: Wash has a War Story too.


**Spoiler Warnings: **Minors for a few episodes, most notably "War Stories".

**Notes: **In the DVD commentary, Alan Tudyk elaborates on his imagined back-story for Wash - namely that he was a pilot for one battle before he got shot down and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp, entertaining the other convicts with shadow puppets. I was fascinated by that comment, and I just had to elaborate. And, ya know, twist in into my own wierd headgame.

* * *

"Fenley? Damn it, you sunavabitch, I need you on my tail!"

"_Bi zui!_ You got no wingmate now, _dong ma?_"

His eyes opened slowly.

The rough voice that grated on his ears and hurt his head turned out not to have any redeeming factors when the face it belonged to was revealed.

Wash blinked a few times, tried to clear the jumble of "ow" from his brain. It didn't work.

"Long way to fall, _dì_."

"Who? Where?" He gave up trying to form a coherent line of inquiry and simply waited for the other man to explain things.

"You Alliance, yes?"

"A lion?" He was confused. He tried to picture the animals from his childhood picture books. "No."

"Alliance _bái chi_."

"Oh." He wanted to close his eyes again, but instead reached up instinctively to feel the back of his head. It hurt so bad, it had to be split open. It felt whole, but tender under his fingers. "Yes. Or, I guess I was."

A harsh chuckle. "Good answer." Another pause. There've been a lot of them even in this short conversation. The man's face grew even more sober. "None of us are nothing. Not anymore. Not here."  
"Where's here?"

"_Yin Ying_. Shadow. Know what the 'lliance is? It's light. What all the vids say, right? "The light of civilization." Lemme tell you something, Hoban Washburn. No light escapes from Shadow. Not ever."

"_Ta ma de,_" A quiet curse, and then a moment of realization. His sluggish mind was the epitome of delayed reaction at the moment. "How did you..." he started, before a particularly bright glint of light caught his eye. He turned his head to find it, reflecting off a small metallic bit dangling from a tarnished chain in his new friend's grip. "Dog tag," he guessed.

"Always wondered what the point was, myself. Seems somewhat redundant, what with the implant chits. But I guess the Great Army finds something nostalgic about 'em. No real need to mess with tradition, is there?"

"I... guess not."

He wanted to ask what had happened to him, but he was afraid he already knew. It had been clear from the moment they launched that the mission, as simple as it was supposed to have been, would fail.

For the first time, he really studied his companion, noticed each deep line of his wrinkled face, the puckered scar above his left eye, the dark rings that signaled sleep deprivation. He noticed the way his skin fell, translucent, the way he could see the bones underneath. This man, once healthy, probably even the type who could have beat Wash up on the playground, was disturbingly thin.

"What's your name?" he asked. The man cracked an ironic smile.

"Viktor. Viktor Pastakov."

Wash raised an eyebrow. A Russian. The country had been dead long before even the migration from Earth-that-Was, yet it's people remained oddly stubborn. They clung to the old names even when the rest of their culture had been assimilated just like everyone else's.

"Viktor Pastakov," he repeated in a low whisper. "How long have you been here?"

Viktor shrugged. "Who can know? Years? Weeks? Hours? I will watch you, Hoban Washburn. I am glad we meet."

"Washburn!"

An explosion of pain. His eyes fluttered open involuntarily. His body spasmed in the cold.

"Wake up, _chú_. We're not finished with you yet."

His teeth chattered even when he put his remaining strength into clenching them together. When he opened his mouth to speak he almost couldn't force the words through his feeble body's attempt to warm itself.

"I already told you," he slurred, sounding drunk. "I don't know anything. Just a grunt."

"Everybody knows something, _bing pi_. Why were you sent here?"

"To Shadow?" He tried desperately to remember. Something about an uprising, a Browncoat militia forming. This was their base. He hadn't been sent here. The world he'd patrolled hadn't housed half as many people.

He hadn't known about the prison. Hadn't known.

"Don't know," he muttered.

One of their heavy batons smashed into his side, shattering whatever ribs had survived intact thus far. He coughed, tasting the iron of his own blood. His stomach felt like the storm-tossed waves of his family's one miserable expedition to the shore when he was very young. He let his eyelids fall, like a slow curtain. His fragmented memory congratulated this mental transition straight out of the vids, this dramatic fade to black.

When he woke hours later, it was with a makeshift bandage of rough cloth wound tightly around his middle. He forced his vision to focus. The dots of color and light coalesced to form an image of Viktor sitting in one corner of their bare cell, shirtless despite the cold. In his lap was one of the spartan bowls that held the rancid soup provided sporadically to keep them from dying.

"Are you hungry, Hoban Washburn?"

At the sound of his name, Wash's hand clutched instinctively at the dogtag caught under his ripped shirt. Viktor had returned it with great ceremony, a king knighting a heroic soldier returned from the battlefield. Wash hadn't been able to bring himself to ask what had happened to the other man's own marker of identity.

"Call me Wash," he choked out as his hand grasped the smooth metal.

Viktor held out the bowl to him. It was mostly full. "Have some food."

He shook his head, despite the knowledge that he hadn't eaten in at least two days and probably wouldn't be offered another chance for at least as many more. His stomach heaved with the nausea born of emptiness. The pain that spiked through his body was such that he could not imagine ever wanting to eat, much less be able to force the food down. Yet when Viktor held the bowl to his lips he could not fight his own reflexive need to swallow.

Finishing the bowl was a slow process. His entire body ached, spiking with pain every time his muscles contracted to swallow, every time his chest rose and fell in breath. He couldn't concentrate enough to count the small slow sips. Viktor's presence was a comfort, though neither of them spoke. The lukewarm sustenance was ice cold by the time the bowl was empty, and the effort had exhausted Wash so much that the pain was not enough to keep him from closing his eyes and sleeping.

They left him alone after that, for a long time. Viktor disappeared. The pain never went away, but he got used to it. He'd already forgotten what it had felt like to live with adequate food and medical care. It was still dark, damp, and cold. But what crept into his head and soul and nested there was the boredom.

He'd never had a problem amusing himself. He'd been the one hidden in the shadowed corner on the edge of the playground with a computer. Any day he could be successfully ignored by the jocks and the bullies was a good day.

But there weren't any computers here. There was nothing to read. For a while he'd tried running the simulators and training games in his head, from every possible angle. He'd counted the cracks in the walls, in the floors and ceiling, coming up with a different number each time. He resorted to closing his eyes and sleeping more than he ever had, simply because there was nothing else to do. He became acutely aware of all the subtle changes in sound, smell, temperature, humidity.

He was in one of his most apathetic phases when he heard the footsteps clanking down the hall, the distinctive limping gait of the nameless, voiceless man who brought the food. It was only as the steps grew closer, as he noticed a second set of footsteps hidden in the echoes of the first, the distinctive slide-clink of chain, that Wash bothered to open his eyes and sit up.

He wasn't sure if what he saw was worth the effort, but at least it gave him something new to think about. The guard's silhouette was already familiar. He was of average height, though that still put him a couple of inches taller than Wash, and he was quite a bit more stacked than the young flyboy. Pushed in front of him was a much more empathetic figure. It was a wiry teenage girl, trying desperately not to trip over her own shackled feet as she was hurried along.

Wash saw very little of her. They were both swallowed by shadow, and he doubted she even noticed him. In the dark he saw her in shades of grey, moving quickly, looking away. She was a silent template onto which he could project his own imagination.

Her arrival shifted the fundamental aura of existence. After days of lethargic apathy, the world around Wash became loud and frenetic. He was no longer being ignored slowly and deliberately. Now it was simply being forgotten in the chaos of the new.

In the midst of these new sensations, the hurried running footsteps, the yells and clicks and pops of weaponry, hours or days into trying and failing to read the pattern, Viktor returned. He was torn up and beaten, struggling to breathe. He'd been tossed into the cell almost as an afterthought, like so much garbage to be disposed of, not a person at all but an inconvenient object.

His eyes fluttered in response to Wash's movements. He groaned desperately.  
"I don't know what to do," Wash admitted in a choked whisper. Panic and helplessness swirled. Wash understood then in a moment of crystalline instinct that what Viktor needed now was calm, quiet and still. He needed distraction. He need comfort, not physical, but simple mental rest. He needed to stop thinking.

Wash closed his eyes and let himself surrender to the guiding force of his own body. He was no doctor or therapist, but he let his fingers intertwine and fly without any noticeable mental processes showing them the way. Seconds later, when he opened his eyes again, he was engrossed in the story of their shadows on the wall, birds and rabbits and dogs. They were mythic now, hearkening back to memory as ancient as childhood.

Viktor too was enthralled, and after his eyes slipped closed and didn't open again, Wash understood the gift of their final exchange of quiet, an untouchable island anchored safe in the uncertainty.

He fell asleep without wanting to, and when he woke he was alone again. Except for the shadows on the walls.

Wash kept telling the stories. He would play them out on the walls, forming the shadows with deft manipulation of his fingers. It was a comfort, a way to find meaning in everything around him that he didn't understand. It was something to do. It kept from going insane, losing himself to fear and despair. The shadows were his anchor.

Everything was different now.

Maybe this meant he had finally grown up. Even during the war, his buddies on the squad had joked about how young he was, how immature. Maybe you had to be alone to be an adult. Maybe you had to know what it was like to be in real danger. Maybe you had to see death.

She returned maybe a week later, one of the shadows that flitted in and out of the cell. She hid in the corner, silent, watching him. He put up a hand in greeting. She didn't respond. She didn't look injured, like most of the others he'd seen.

"_Ni hao_," he started. Still nothing, but he wasn't daunted. "My name's Wash. Hoban Washburn, actually, but no one calls me that." He didn't mind talking to himself. He'd never minded. "I saw you before, a few days ago."

She still didn't speak, but her eyes followed him as he moved. And she watched the shadow puppets.

He felt their eyes on him. Things had slowed down again, enough for them to remember he was there.

All his life, he'd gotten used to being watched, studied, tested. As a child, he'd been different from his classmates, and the teachers and his parents and the doctors had wondered what was wrong with his brain.

In flight school, the whole point was observation. He and his classmates watched each other, competing for the favor and approval of the military officers who in turn watched them. The pressure there was intense, and for the first time it became necessary to bond to others to survive. He'd been good, but not the best, and he needed something else to insure his continued existence in the school. He started small. His absurd sense of humor blossomed with his roommate, up all night studying for exams or getting sick from the stress. He grew more comfortable with ever-growing groups, first two or three, then drinking groups of five, six, ten, until he became the one people came to when the tension needed to be broken. The meetings were always informal, the jokes and games spontaneous. He took his childhood amusements and projected them to his new audience.

Wash still worried, trying not to, but he was never alone anymore. Not much for conversation, but she listened when he vented his concerns.

He'd gotten adjusted to the quiet, slow pattern of their days. Sometimes he thought about psychoanalyzing her. In his head he asked her questions, and constructed the answers. There were all kinds of plausible scenarios. Like him, she was from a city in the Core. Or she was from a farm town on the edge, one of many the Browncoats controlled. Something had happened to her, made her silent.

They came to him. He wasn't expecting it. They picked him up and carted him to a small, dingy conference room with beat-up table and chairs.

He raised his eyebrows, leaned back in the chair, crossed his arms over his chest. It was a dangerous projection of overconfidence, but they didn't call his bluff. They simply stared at him across the table.

"We need her to talk."

He shrugged. "You've been watching. She hasn't said a damn thing. _Bu zuo sheng._"

"Nevertheless, there is a bond forming between you. As you said, we've been watching."

"What do you want from me?"

A fist connected with his face. A trip-kick attempted to take his legs out from underneath him. He didn't bother trying to block them, simply caught himself on the fall. He wiped his face instinctively, spit, looked up at the officers.

"I told you, I don't know anything."

The man knelt, close to his face.

"And that, Mr. Washburn, is exactly our problem."

"I'm _trying_."

"Try harder."

"There's something wrong with her head."

That day when they finally let him back in his cell, she hadn't even moved. In fact, she didn't even seem to notice when he collapsed there. She was huddled in a tight ball in one corner of the room, but that was hardly unusual. She never looked at him, but she covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut, like someone invisible to him was screaming in her face. For once, he didn't feel obligated to make her feel better.

When the throbbing in his head lessened, he watched her, wondering what the hell was locked up in her head that made her so valuable to their captors.

Alliance propaganda made the Independents all out to be barbarians, but he had never believed it was that simple. They tended to be a little more direct, resorting to physical fights in situations where the Alliance would hide behind their fancy technology, but that didn't make them stupid. There were competent leaders on both sides, brilliant tacticians playing war games. People like him, and her, and even the men who watched them both, were just pawns to those demigods they would never meet, expendable pieces on a 'verse-wide board.

Sometimes Wash even considered that the Browncoats might be the smarter ones, to be holding their own against such overwhelming odds. They'd do better longer in a war of attrition, because out on the edge people never had much anyway. They could make do on their own for a while if the Alliance enforced a blockade on any of their worlds. Wash remembered one day when a storm surge had killed the power in his house for a few hours when he was a kid, how the food grid went down, how his mother had panicked. The Alliance didn't know how to live if everything they wanted wasn't instantly at their fingertips. On Shadow, he was learning.

At some point, he realized he was hungry. He knew they were waiting for him to crack her shell. Not for the first time, he wondered why they needed him as a middleman. As far as he knew, they had never laid a violent hand against her, which made her a special case. Clearly they knew something about her that he didn't, and despite their desperate need for him to open a dialogue, they left him to guess everything about his silent companion, and never even told him what he was supposed to ask. He'd always been stubborn, and this was just another problem to solve. He knew they were watching, but he wanted to make a friend. He looked her over, not at all surprised when she didn't acknowledge him.

"Well," he sighed. "I'm bored. Aren't you?"

No answer.

"Yeah, I figured."

She seemed to respond to the shadow puppets, so he tried those again, new characters, ancient stories.

"You could do it too, ya know? I could teach you."

He approached her cautiously, letting his hand linger a few inches away, waiting for permission, the way he'd been told one was supposed to tame a dangerous animal. She met his eyes, watching him with rapt attention. He touched her gently, ready to spring backward if it came to that. He had no way of knowing how broken she was.

But she did nothing, simply watched as he guided her fingers, projected their shapes onto the walls, the floor, the ceiling, drinking it all in. When he let go, she kept the cinema going, and he found himself engrossed in her story.

He index finger made one lone, simple figure, that he understood to represent her. She moved freely at first, not seeming to notice as she rapidly approached the sharp line of darkness drawn where the light stopped reaching the corner opposite them. From this darkness came an indistinct monster, one who approached her, calmly inviting. She followed. On the edge of the border between darkness and light, he swallowed her. She tried to fight her way out, but to no avail. She kept reaching, but eventually, she could no longer be seen. And the monster returned to the darkness.

He tried not to breathe for moments after the story ended. He was afraid to break the silence. The questions threatened to overwhelm him, but he understood more than he ever had. He met her eyes, and she was waiting for him there.

"Not them," she said. Her voice was too weak to be heard, but he understood the movements of her lips. "People like you."

He frowned, and she grabbed his dogtag, desperate to make herself understood. He nodded, understanding now. "People like me," he confirmed. The Alliance had done this to her. Her monster wasn't Shadow at all. It came from the light of the Core.

"Where did you find her?"

"What did she tell you?"

"Nothing."

"Liar!"

"She was Alliance. Like me. Like Viktor. Like the others. You knew that. It's all I got out of her and it took me forever to get that. It wasn't hard to guess. We're all prisoners of war."  
"The hand code. What did it mean?"

"The shadow puppets? It's not a code. Just a game kids play. She likes it. Who _is_ she?"

"She is no one. A secret keeper. She is dangerous."

_Secret keeper_. He thought about all the things she knew, everything she'd heard and seen, huddled in her corner, listening. How much did she know about him? About them? Did she understand? Did she care?

He'd known she was broken, but if what they said was true, she was no longer a person at all. Just a recording device. And a weapon. Perhaps her monster had sent her here to find out about their enemy. The Browncoats were afraid to set her off, didn't know her trigger. That was what they needed from him. And the minute they got it, none of them were safe.

Wash narrowed his eyes. He didn't like this gamble they were making, with his life.

"What exactly is she capable of?"

They didn't answer. They didn't know. There was no way of knowing.

He returned to his cell and watched her and tried, but he couldn't see anything more than a frightened child. She didn't deserve this. She'd never wanted it. She'd tried to fight it. She'd fought through enough to tell him, to make him understand. She trusts him, needs him to help her.

Or maybe it's all a game.

You can't fight the hidden monsters. They all know it.

He doesn't know what to do now. He wants her to trust him. He wants to rescue her.

He knows it isn't possible.

They know it too.

They took her one day and left him alone, but now it was the haunted loneliness born of helplessness and worry.

He never saw her again, and it ate at him, always, underneath.

Inside of him, the shadow play continued.

"You are the secret keeper now, Hoban Washburn."

River liked to sit in the cockpit with him, learning how to fly the ship. He liked teaching her. She was watching him now, with haunted eyes, and the sober smile she did so well, that look that reminded him...

"What did you say?"

"She was like me, and now you're like her. It's okay, Wash. You're not alone anymore."


End file.
